#I hope there is a bug that prevent them from changing even if the devs implement it

[eta-volantis]

I just saw the funniest post ever on Reddit of someone ranting and crying about not being able to change from Belle to Wise because... *checks note* the fanservice with the women are now lesbian. I don't know what to tell the guy like what did you expect from a game that is known for fanservice like bro please. I hope they never let us do it because this is too funny. Let him suffer the lesbians and I hope Belle get all the girls. The I'm not homophobic, BUT- is something to behold.

[mistakenot4892]

Nebula blevdog April '24

This post was crossposted from cohost.

Quite a bit to talk about this month! Mostly relating to the various crafting and building systems being put into place for the low-fantasy map, currently titled Shaded Hills.

Nebula SS13 is an open source project based on the Baystation 12 version of Space Station 13. SS13 is a topdown multiplayer simulation game where you play the crew of a ship, station, colony, etc. depending on your fork and map, with the Nebula and Bay forks having a focus on roleplaying and simulation interactions.

Notable changes

Fair bit of boring backend stuff - some HUD code has been streamlined, the way stack recipes are handled has been redone, and using an item with even the slightest heat difference to the target will no longer 'carefully heat' it.

Penny removed a metric shitload of unused procs and variables, cleaning up the codebase and revealing that a bunch of really fiddly DNA code just... doesn't need to exist anymore. Blessed.

The fantasy map is now merged into the main dev branch, and has been receiving periodic updates from Penny and I. It's slowly approaching a state where it can be playable...

Flame sources like matches and lighters have been reworked, and now include fueled lanterns and torches, which can be crafted. This is mainly to support the fantasy map, but also means you can hotbox the station in carbon monoxide with 200 lighters burning at once, if that appeals to you.

Farms have been redone. Rather than building a plot out of stone, you now dig a plot into a dirt or mud turf. Plots will take water from adjacent water sources or rain, and you can fence them with bricks to prevent people walking over them and squashing your crops.

Various other crafting systems are in, albeit in skeletal form. Metalwork, tanning, making catgut, and weaving cloth are now supported. You can grow cotton, process it on a spinning wheel to make thread, and then weave the thread into cloth on a loom.

Fishing got merged. It's basically Stardew Valley without the minigame, currently. If I can get through my backlog in a reasonable timeframe I'm going to try working on a proper little minigame for it, but it's a pretty chill mechanic currently.

Bugs of note

r5 is overdue, mostly because I've been putting my after-work dev hours into random stuff like weaving or clothing code. Hoping to get onto that before making any more big feature PRs. I have instructed the dev channel to smack me if I open more feature PRs before r5 is stable.

While testing campfire cooking I was saddened to discover that all of my food would get up to cooking temperature and then instantly melt into 'liquid nutriment' which fertilized the ground under my campfire.

Downstream on Scav, dexterity changes resulted in one of the species being totally unable to pick up or use items with the only inventory slot they had capable of doing so (their mouth). 'Baxxid Stares Longingly At Vending Machine' indeed.

Current priorities

r5 is the main priority, we need to get that stable as soon as possible. r6 is going to be enormous due to all the crafting changes and several big backend rewrites like the removal of /turf/simulated.

I'm working on getting the fantasy map into a state where we can actually run a round, off and on. There's still a pretty big laundry list of props we need to be able to get the map populated, but it's all pretty achievable.

My storage rewrite PR is now up to its fourth or fifth rebase. Please save me from this PR.

[forcedhesitation]

the whole argument that the devs continually adding new content/features to the game is "pandering to fans" or "unhealthy for the game" is ridiculous in general. they're doing this shit for free, we aren't paying for any of these changes- changes & features that improve the overall quality of the game.

of course this doesn't mean you can't continue to ask for better! or continue to report bugs! or suggest changes that would improve quality of life! as previously mentioned, I still hope to see some improvements to wyll & karlach's routes, because they have so much less content than the other companions! but I'm not going to sit and pretend that what changes they have made have been unhealthy for the game or that larian is overall out of touch with their community.

you know what was out of touch with a community? bhvr nearly nerfing two addons on a killer in dead by daylight that almost no one plays. those addons do not make the killer OP, but simply more fun to play. this was all because whoever's in charge of deciding nerfs seems to only look at statistics without contextualising any of those numbers. that's out of touch. an entire community should not have to make a massive uproar and petitions just to prevent a change that any player with even a basic understanding of how the killer role works would never endorse. THAT is out of touch.

you know what's unhealthy? the way that dead by daylight has to consider profit when balancing perks. the fact that survivors had an obnoxious haste boosting perk that went untouched for MONTHS all because that perk came from a non-licensed chapter that they wanted to increase the profit from is unhealthy. the fact that bhvr has repeatedly stated that the most useless and weak killer in the game is "perfectly fine" is beyond ridiculous and unhealthy. the fact that certain extremely powerful perks with unfair features (like STBFL or adrenaline) have still not been nerfed is unhealthy. the fact that it's taken years for them to even entertain nerfing the numerous, outrageously strong addons of one of the most powerful killers in the game is unhealthy.

larian trying to improve the experience of a one-time payment game for new and existing players by acknowledging exploits in reasonable ways, adding additional content where it's relatively easy and feasible to do (unique kisses, the epilogue), and continuously implementing great quality of life changes (simplifying combat & indicating turns more clearly, the magic mirror) is not unhealthy. it's smart. it's more than you'll get from practically any other game.

so yeah. it could be better. but it's nowhere near as bad as it could be.

the “criticism” that larian should never have added good minthara recruitment and that that was just “pandering” to fans is so unbelievably ridiculous. what else were they supposed to do about the sheepthara exploit?? attempt to patch it out and likely fuck up plenty of people’s game files? the solution they offered literally just acknowledges the exploit without dramatically changing anything, other than the player’s ability to have both minthara and halsin in their camp. if you want to kill minthara, recruit halsin, and play an authentic good run, then do so. if you want to abandon halsin, attack the grove, and authentically recruit minthara, then do so. the sheepthara method being simplified and added into the game has absolutely zero bearing on anyone’s ability to play the game normally. some people are just making a problem out of nothing. perhaps go complain about something actually worthwhile, like the lack of content for wyll and karlach.

[nerd-takes-pony-town]

So... Dergun Town's gone, at last - Temp. Tester Rant.

To be frankly honest, I was waiting for it to end. I stopped playing after the weird ass Pet update and sudden, unnannounced Hair Change due to “legal reasons” because the game was just getting utterly confusing, a mess of minigames with clunky customization options and systems, and whatnot. Plus, my time as a tester was when I hit the breaks on the game and realized "man... they really are dicks".

I never ranted about it because I knew if I did, they'd definitely come for me and ban me from the game or from the server because "I shittalked about the game" or “I’m unveiling the tester server”, but now that it's over - it's time for a rant.

So, think it was around May 2020 that I decided to go for Tester to better prepare myself for the future updates, the chat itself was basically... like the lobby, just mainly memes and the Dev fanatics, who will defend them 24/7, chatting with the Devs.

One of the first few things that was asked for is the Timezones so that we could test the server together - the Timezones thing is literally thrown out the window after the very first test. From there on, what they would do is ping the Testers to announce an update - at the time, we had no changelog, no proper bug report channel, it was all crowded in one place, and because they disregarded the Timezones, imagine if you will the chat being both filled with players spamming the chat with all the new shit like some happy toddlers, and another half are people who are reporting to be in class, asleep, dinnering, ect.

A chaotic mess that makes it near impossible to actually report something. Eventually, they added a bug report but once again, no proper check list - if any, the changelog and the checklist only appeared around the Argoras or Minigame Update (June-July). And, as always, the checklist was never updated, so you'd be testing something that's already been checked and other listed things wouldn't be checked at all. Organization, which is something a Tester needs, was never a fucking thing in that horrid mess. They would occasionally do polls, one of which was if the Update should release now, nearly everyone said No - they released it anyway. :^)

Then, there would be some bugs where they’d blame us for it - the /hitme was a command that was restrictedly used in the test server because the Devs somehow don’t know how to add a small quantity of resources to all of us, so he instead made a command that gives, what? Over a million of each of the resources? We ALL made sure that wasn’t toggled on the “beta” server, and yet, somehow, it got released with the commad functioning, and instead of admitting their fault, they blamed the Testers for practically saying folks not to use it - one of the testers was literally STRIPPED OFF of their Gil and other resources, and mind you, they didn’t even used the command at all, all they did was accidentally say the command.

The Moderators would also be rather cruel, everyone likes memes, that's granted, but it shouldn't mean you can willingly change our nicknames like that. Imagine switching over to the chat only to find out your name, along with all the other testers, has been changed to "Todd Howard"; you rename it, and a couple of days later, they change it yet again without your permission or consent. This isn't fun, this is just annoying. I had to walk around with "Stop changin my name" on my nickname because of them.

And like how it has been told, these Devs cannot take criticism at all. The Argoras Update will haunt me down as the Update where I was literally fighting against other testers and the Devs over something that needed to be changed. In the Test Server, the Skill Points had a Clover table, meaning you used clovers for Skill Points, the thing is in Pony Town, the rewards are remain unlocked even if you go down the unlocking mark - Dergun Town does not. So players who are unaware of this would've wasted 1k Clovers and then realize that their prizes have been taken away because they're no longer above the unlocking mark. So as a Tester, it should be my duty to warn the Devs about it and come with suggestions.

I told them without mentioning Pony Town at all (because they have a stupid policy of “if it’s close to PT, we can’t do it”) about how the Clover option will result in players losing their reward if they go below 1k and 500 Clovers respectively, which is the equivalent to hundreds of players putting all those days collecting Clovers to waste. They would ABSOLUTELY rant  about it in Bugs or Help Desk. I suggested them to either:

Make the rewards unlocked still even if you left the mark.

Remove the Clover option

Add a warning when about to select Clover

Those are the ones on top of my head, what did they do?

Tom just kept ignoring what I said on the first suggestion and exclusively focusing on the second one, as if it was the only option available. Meanwhile, Q was guilt tripping me into bidding to their commands, "37,500 gil per skill if you the 50 points pure,," it's horrible, sure, but do you really want to deal with a hoard of players coming to the server to scream about how the Skill Point system stole their Clover rewards? And having to deal with a patch or two to make them happy, or worse, having to ban more players because they’re angry WITH REASON that their prizes were taken away because you idiots refuse to add something that allows the players to keep their rewards while below the mark?

You know they would do that, everyone knows they would do that. And worse is with exception of one or two Testers, the other users, specifically folks like J*y and D**r, just kept defending the Devs even though I was literally helping them prevent a future problem that everyone knew it would fucking happen. What's the point of testing a game if the Developers will fucking refuse to take your advices?

They did removed the Clovers from the options, but kept the Dandelions and the Bones, which, you guested it, STILL DIDN'T HAD THE PRIZE LOCKING! And the best part - NO WARNING REGARDING THE LOST OF THE PRIZES WAS ADDED EITHER! So players who had the Dandelion Rune and the ability to get the special items from the Bone would end up in losing them without them knowing - though it’s not as bad as the Clovers, a resource that restrictedly spawns in areas with Clovers as opposed to be map-wide and the last prize needs 1k of those, and the recent-ish Spring Update changed the green to a shade that blends with them.

I singlehandedly helped them avoid a hoard of angry players, and not a singular thank you was given.

The Quest Cap is also a thing, if the mobile users are in such a disadvantage with the Clovers being gone, then why are you adding the Cap anyway? Everyone knows that if a game is relying on the player to grind, it should not cap the Quests to a fucking T - only 20 Quests per hour?! And the NPC's Gil is both dependant on Bootleg Flight Rising Dominance... and dependant on a Clan that YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY CHANGE even if you request for such?! It's like if in Flight Rising, because Fiona has Light eyes, Light Flight would gain extra bonus treasure from here as if Dominance wasn't enough. "It's to balance the Economy", how is that going to balance, it just restricting the mobile users even further, as if the shitty battle controls on mobile that makes it impossible to battle wasn't enough.

The game was also just turning into a weird, funky, Flight Rising bootleg - fitting how the game that Q also worked on was a bootleg hybrid between Dragon Cave and Flight Rising - the release of pets with these genes and barely any use but to literally do the exact shit you do in FR. In FR, you exalt Dragons to gain a upper hand at Dominance, in DT, a rather recent-ish? Update allowed you to sell the Magikins (the gened pets, the other pets are literally useless) for Clan Tokens, giving you a boost to gain Dominance. It’s exactly like FR, I’m surprised no one ever bothered to contact the FR folks about this ripoff. The pets did had a use and it was to gain more gil but a nerf was done because, once again, they released an update were we made SURE that wasn’t happening, but somehow, it happened - the Pet-Gill Machine Glitch that allowed you to gain infinite Gil.

My pets got bugged because of it - the level got reset (it’d only reward 1-2 gil) but the price of the upgrade did not (750 gil) - I asked if that was a nerf or a bug, and as expected, they said it was nerf when it was clear as days it was a bug given how people had pets that requried 700+ gil and rewarded 30+ gil.

The game’s just a mess of minigames and FR Ripoff, I could go on and on with just how bad the game is, but the Devs are even worse.

It's really bad when they're once straight up muted someone for speaking their fucking opinion.

(You may need to zoom)

(From PMs)

This user would constantly bring the flaws in their shit without insulting, they'd argue with reason, give suggestions, everything, in hopes of improving the game. and they instead just argued back, if not, criticized them for even bringing an opinion and tried to justify themselves as to why they didn't need to change - and the users would absolutely defend the Devs like literal ass kissers, to the point of being happy they got muted.

As the user rightfully said in PMs:

I wanted to make contributions that could help improve it, but it seems like the staff just want people to do as they say without question instead of looking for ways to improve. And they desperately need to understand that the game is not just about what they want, what kinds of designs they think players should make. It should be encouraging players to try new designs and be creative, but all the devs want to do is shut that down.

I just wish they didn't have absolute power over the server. If they were accountable to their community in some way, it'd be possible to convince them to make changes when it's really necessary. Not all the time, just when their stubbornness is getting in the way of something that absolutely everybody except them wants.

The fun in these games has always been in the community. If you stifle that, you stifle the game. And unfortunately, I now can't say any of this. Making demon combat even harder for those without skill points was wholly unnecessary, too. I don't know what their obsession is with making the game so heavy on grinding.

Back when I first arrived, Dergun Town was mostly just Pony Town with more customization options, plus a few special prizes you could earn by gathering items. Nowadays it seems like the devs are more interested in forcing players to grind for literally everything than they are in adding new stuff everyone can enjoy and use.

But worse than that is how they always respond to criticism. The mini-events were the biggest example of that. Players didn't like being forced to spend all day on Dergun Town just for any chance to win an award in mini-events. It was damaging people's ability to have a life outside the game, and a lot of users complained. How did they respond? They basically threatened to remove the mini-events altogether and make all the items from them unobtainable, rather than improving on anything. This is how the staff responds to all complaints and suggestions. It's either the exact thing they want or nothing, and if they make a mistake big enough that everyone complains, rather than admitting fault, they basically punish the community for being unhappy. Their entire mentality is "play by my rules or I'm taking my toys and going home".

Reminder that when the garden update broke and erased a ton of players' houses and items, they blamed the players and said they had to do all the work to get everything that was lost back themselves.

I swear, all of this "you complained now you get nothing" and "we work hard, so be thankful to us even for terrible content" we hear in the user suggestions channel is just conditioning their player base to accept being taken for granted and mistreated. They're basically trying to induce Stockholm Syndrome.

Someone who’s also on Tumblr got banned for saying that the new design of the hairs made their characters look ugly - it was a change that was NEVER ANNOUNCED, specially considering it’s a change regarding “legal issues”, the playerbase should’ve been warned about this before they updated it. But instead, they got pissy that some people have complained about the drastically changed hairs and once again, shit down on them for complaining.

Dergun Town is an excellent example of how some people are not and never were meant to run a game - the guilt tripping, the “accept this or get lost” attitude, the behavior they had and occasionally have regarding Pony Town (search “Let’s Talk About Dergun Town” and you’ll get the document), to the point of banning the actual word “to avoid drama” aka keep folks from talking about their real fucking nature.

I am honestly happy that Dergun Town got shut down while Pony Town keeps improving and growing, karma was indeed well served.

[frostiifae]

so i’m reading @bungieteam​’s PR statement re: the Destiny currency deletion bug and its recurrence, and I worry that because of the impact this bug and the resulting downtime has had on players, a large portion of the community might overlook just how ridiculously unlucky this situation was for bungie

for context, i’m a professional software developer and have worked extensively with cloud software and server infrastructure, so safe to say i have a good working knowledge of the kind of tech that Destiny runs on

essentially this comes down to a situation where a new version of Destiny was released with a bug, then a hotfix was applied, but some of Destiny’s servers didn’t have the hotfix due to a freak accident. But saying it like that fails to really communicate how incredibly unlikely this was.

Firstly:

The bug was caused due to a change that was apparently unrelated to the actual bug’s effects (changing the way quests’ timestamps are reset is only very tangentially related to how inventory management works)

The bug was caught by Bungie’s internal testing team, but because there was no obvious change that could have caused it, their investigation suggested that it was a bug in their test tools and not the game itself

To reiterate, the bug was caught by Bungie before release, but was such a slippery bastard that it got away from them after being caught

A hotfix is released and applied to all active servers. It works and fixes the bug! We’re in business! 

Alright, so then Crimson Days launches. Because Bungie anticipates heavier load than usual, they increase the number of active servers to handle said load. It is important understand that Bungie is working with servers by the hundreds, the kinds of numbers that demand using automatic tools to launch and update those servers, but those tools are of course also tested and well understood. Let me walk you through everything that had to go wrong for the bug to occur a second time: 

Bungie gives the command to increase the number of active servers. New servers go through an extensive verification process that ensures they have the proper version of Destiny, including the hotfix, and if they don’t they are disabled and presumably taken back down. 

Today, a tiny percentage of these servers failed to start because of backing database load issues. Bungie is aware of this problem. It normally doesn’t affect players; their fix is to restart the servers “manually” (which is pretty standard for this kind of problem), and once they’re running they work just fine. 

Bungie does not realize that the server crash prevented the hotfix from being applied. This is a sensible mistake to make, if an unfortunate one. It is understandable that they wouldn’t worry too deeply about this: they have a verification process that is designed to catch errors like these. 

Except: the verification process doesn’t run properly on manually restarted servers. Bungie does not know this. In fact, in their statement, they say that they “thought [it] was an impossible situation“. 

Bungie manually tests their live environment, which is a good idea, but they can’t test all of their servers - there’s too many - and by pure chance, they don’t manage to catch any of the bugged servers during their tests.  

Reading through Bungie’s description of what happened was like reading a horror novel. I’m normally very critical of dev and operations procedures for online games like this, but I can’t help but feel like every reasonable precaution was taken in this situation. In fact I’m impressed that Bungie found and caught it as quickly as they did, though I do hope they’re able to improve their rollback procedures (even if I also hope they never have to use them again). 

Not that I expect many people in the community to wind up reading this, but to those who do: don’t be too harsh with Bungie. I promise, this one isn’t their fault.

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 10/31/19

This week at Bungie, we’re hosting a celebration.

Festival of the Lost has been unleashed on the Tower. Cobwebs are everywhere, black cats are on the prowl, and every vendor has some candy for you to enjoy. Eva Levante went all-out this year on decorations and brought some new masks for you to earn. While candies and treats are readily available, you also have the BrayTech Werewolf to earn, packing the multikill clip punch. The Tower isn’t the only place that’s a bit spookier. There’s been an uprising on the Moon, and Eris is calling on you to challenge the Hive in the Altars of Sorrow and the Pit of Heresy.

Xenophage made its grand entrance, bug and all. We’ve seen Guardians cracking the puzzle and claiming their Exotic in real time, but it isn’t the only new weapon for you to add to your arsenal. We’ve got some Hive-infused weapons that not only look mean, but back it up with some serious firepower.

If you’re wanting to take on opposing Guardians with a bit more lethality, Momentum Control has arrived. Fast respawns, quicker kills, and ability regeneration tied to the defeat of your opponents. Get out there and make Shaxx proud.

So, now that we’ve covered everything that went live on Tuesday, let’s see what else is on the calendar: A charity, a costume contest, a hotfix, a bounty, and more are inbound.

TRICK OR TREAT!

Even with everything going on, we can take a moment to appreciate the little things in life. A bit of humor in the face of fear. Eva Levante is hosting the Festival of the Lost this year, and we have another opportunity for players to earn the Levante Prize. Throw on a mask, embrace your inner darkness, and join us in celebrating Festival of the Lost 2019.

Want to participate? Here’s how:

Create a costume for your Guardian and strike a pose in the perfect setting.

Snap a screenshot in any Destiny 2 destination or activity.

Play with shaders and armor combinations for the spookiest outcomes.

Group participation is encouraged!

Submit your image to the Community Creations page on Bungie.net.

We’ll retweet our favorites from @Bungie and grant winners the Levante Prize.

If you do win, make sure you give us Bungie.net profile links so we can deliver the emblems!

While we’re all for fun and games, we’d love for you to try and scare us while you’re at it. Bonus points to those who do.

PINNACLE HOTFIX INBOUND

Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.6.1.1 is tentatively planned for Thursday, November 7. It contains some quality-of-life fixes for the sandbox and Season Pass weapon acquisition. One of the more major changes deals with your pursuit of pinnacle Power. While we’ll be providing a patch note preview below, we have some words from the team on our initial goals for pinnacle Power and why we’re making some adjustments.

Dev Team: When we designed the pinnacle band of Power for Season 8, our intent was to provide an aspirational progression that reflects participation in some of the more difficult and time-limited content of Destiny 2. This was meant to be a slower progression than the powerful reward band, but one that wasn’t a gateway to accessing content.

We’re not hitting our goals for the availability of rewards in all slots for the pinnacle-level rewards. You may have experienced getting duplicate Energy weapon drops from these sources, which is compounded by the need to get a drop in all slots in order to gain enough Power to raise your character’s overall Power by 1. To mitigate this, we have increased the Power granted by pinnacle rewards to +2 instead of +1.

Once this change goes live, only four slots will be needed to increase your character’s average Power, at which point your powerful rewards will allow those slots that you might have missed to catch up. Our goal is that the pinnacle band remains a reward for tackling the more prestigious challenges, but takes some of the sting away from receiving multiple drops in the same slot. We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received on this, we and hope to hear more from you on how this band of progression feels with the new change.

PLEASE NOTE: As this change is currently planned for next Thursday, players should wait to earn their pinnacle rewards until this hotfix is available so they can take advantage of the +2 change.

Alongside the changes to pinnacle rewards, we’re also adding the Season Pass weapons (Pluperfect and Temporal Clause) as possible rewards from the Vex Offensive activity. While players may currently unlock the chance for these weapons to drop with random rolls from the Crucible, Gambit, and strikes, we wanted to add them to another activity to give players more agency in earning random rolls.

Additionally, we’ve developed a fix for ashes to assets to prevent Telesto from being the absolute best-o, where players could earn their Supers far more quickly than intended.

Stay tuned to @BungieHelp for updates on the exact time and date of this hotfix.

IRON FRIGHT

Amid all this excitement, Lord Saladin wanted to get in on the action. The Iron Banner returns next week, bringing Power-enabled combat back to the Crucible. With a handful of bounties in tow, you’ll have opportunities to earn the Iron Will armor set, along with some pinnacle-tier rewards.

Iron Banner Control

Starts: 9 AM Pacific on November 5

Ends: 9 AM Pacific on November 12

Note: You may be thinking “Wait, 9 AM? What’s going on here?” – Day Light Savings ends this weekend for us in the states. I know, it’s confusing. I don’t really know why it happens either. You can find more information in the Player Support Report later in this very article.

Earlier this week, Destiny 2 Update 2.6.1 introduced changes to Heavy ammo spawning in the Crucible. The following change will also be present within the Iron Banner:

Heavy ammo initial spawn changed to 60 seconds (was 45 seconds)

Heavy ammo additional spawning changed to every 120 seconds (was every 60 seconds)

Now, to make sure we say it again, we are currently planning a hotfix that will increase pinnacle reward Power gains next Thursday. We highly recommend that players wait to redeem any Iron Banner bounties which reward pinnacle gear until the hotfix has been applied.

We also fixed an issue in 2.6.1 that was causing the Iron Banner bounties to reset daily. Players will have four bounties to complete throughout the week.

REGICIDE

If you follow your community news, you know that Gothalion is on the move to a new streaming platform. To ensure a nice, warm welcome in his new home on Mixer, we’re inviting the internet to hunt him down in the Crucible. We’ve placed a Bungie Bounty on his head! It seemed like the neighborly thing to do…

Bungie Bounty—King Gothalion

Saturday, November 2, 10 AM–Noon Pacific

Momentum Control on PC

www.mixer.com/kinggothalion

Festival of the Lost has introduced a new competitive mode in the Crucible. If you play on PC, that’s your hunting ground. The rules are simple: Match with Gothalion, as either a teammate or an opponent, and win. The game must be played on his stream during the two hours allotted. To the victors go the new Bungie Bounty emblem.

This is a housewarming party and you’re all invited to attend. Bring snacks and ammunition. This is one of those rare occasions in which stream sniping is encouraged!

CHARITABLE ENDEAVORS

This week was also host to the inaugural Game2Give charity event, supporting the Bungie Foundation’s iPads for Kids program and Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. We’ve been blown away by the community involvement, as we’ve raised nearly 1 million in donations from Guardians around the world. The charity is still going, and this weekend continues the event with DCPLive, joined by special guest Pete Parsons!

As a reminder, we have a few incentives for each donation, 100% of which goes to the charity!

A $10 donation will earn you the NEW Mist Blossoms emblem.

A $50 donation will earn you both the Mist Blossoms emblem and our first-ever Charity Ghost, the Gilded Shell Exotic Ghost.

A $100 donation will earn you both items above and enter you to win an item from the Bungie Prize Pool.

We’re having many more players join in on this event through the weekend, so stay tuned to http://bung.ie/game2givestream for more information.

FORGE WARDENS

Two-Six-One was our most recent update. We’ve got a slew of changes that have gone live, but it seems that the Izanagi’s Burden quest line continues to evade some players. Destiny Player Support is on the case, bringing the most up-to-date information on what we’re tracking.

This is their report:

Izanagi’s Burden

Earlier this week, we deployed Destiny 2 Update 2.6.1 to players. With this update, we resolved an issue that was preventing a subset of players from completing the Mysterious Box quest to receive Izanagi’s Burden. Following this update, however, new issues have emerged which block progression further down the line for this quest. Specifically, Destiny Player Support is tracking the following two issues:

Players are not receiving progress when redeeming forge keys.

Players are not receiving progress for the Obsidian Crystal received from rare Black Armory bounties.

These issues are currently under investigation, to be addressed in a future update. Players who are encountering other issues with Black Armory forges or the Mysterious Box quest should report to the #Help forum.

Festival of the Lost

This week, Festival of the Lost returned in Destiny 2. Eva Levante has made sure that this Festival is open to all.

For anyone joining us in progress, let’s review the entry requirements outlined last week:

Brand-new players who go through the New Light experience must achieve at least 770 Power before Eva Levante will beckon them with her Festival of the Lost introductory quest. If these players are lower than 770 Power, they will not be able to interact with Eva Levante at all.

All veteran players, including those who were boosted to 750 Power at the launches of New Light and Shadowkeep, may head directly to Eva Levante to begin her quest.

Don’t forget to wear your favorite mask when completing activities around the solar system. Wearing a mask is required in order to earn candy and Chocolate Strange Coins.

Lastly, this year’s Festival of the Lost will conclude at the weekly reset on November 19. Players looking for more information on Festival of the Lost should see our official guide.

Destiny 2 Known Issues

In addition to issues with the Mysterious Box quest tracked above, Destiny Player Support is investigating the following issues to emerge in Destiny 2:

Players may intermittently experience delayed loot drops and/or pursuit progression. If a player is at activity completion and has not yet received their loot, they should make sure they do not return to Orbit early.

If a Cabal Scorpius Turret Daemon falls off the map in the Haunted Forest, it will not be killed and won’t respawn, halting progress. Players will have to wait out the remaining time to collect rewards, or return to Orbit and restart the activity.

Following the launch of Destiny 2 Update 2.6.1, we monitored elevated ANTEATER, MONKEY, and WEASEL errors. At this time, issues causing these elevated errors are expected to be resolved. For the latest information on the state of Destiny services, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed at help.bungie.net.

For the latest known issues to be confirmed by Destiny Player Support, players should visit our Known Issues thread in the #Help forum.

Daily and Weekly Reset Time Change

Beginning this Sunday, November 3, Daylight Savings Time in the United States will end. This means that Destiny 2’s reset time will change to 9 AM PST (1700 UTC) through March 2020.

For more information, please view our Destiny 2 Ritual Reset Guide.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

UNDERSTANDING YOUR USERS IS PART OF WHAT HIGHER-LEVEL LANGUAGES, AND TWO ARE STILL UNIQUE TO LISP

I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. Good hackers insist on control. Overloading, for example, have been around 7-10x.1 Hard to say exactly, but wherever it is, but the fear of missing out. I couldn't talk to them. Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. There will of course come a point where there is just too much to keep in your head in order to conceive of the program, and so on. A complex macro may have to save many times its own length to be justified.

If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. Economically, this is a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness. So being cheap is almost interchangeable with iterating rapidly. And when you look at what they're doing on that computer, you'll find the most general truths. There are plenty of other areas that are just as valuable as positive ones. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people working on them discover a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them.

It was presumably many thousands of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what is heat? The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. And the project starts small because the idea is small at first; he just has some cool hack he wants to try out. Apple's competitors now know better. Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. If you want ideas for startups, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or Xerox. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is say one word to them, at least.

Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. How tech-saturated Silicon Valley is where it is.2 Which usually means that you have to declare the type of every variable, and can't tell one programming language from another, and work well together.3 If you think you're 85% of the way into Lisp, they could probably do it. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want. And now Wall Street is collectively kicking itself.4 There is actually some data out there about that. Some may even deliberately stall, because they enjoy it. I didn't realize that when we were raising money. Like a parent saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a more interesting one.

It won't seem so preposterous in 10,000 years. It's not something you work despite.5 In such situations it's helpful to have working democracies and multiple sovereign countries. It always was cool. Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time.6 Getting money from an investor than an employer. I've learned so much from working on it. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a restatement of the first. A better way to get one loaded into your head. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy. Garbage-collection.

So startup culture may not merely be different in the way we do. If that's what's on the other side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope. Bill Gates knows this. Programs composed of expressions. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Sometimes when you return to it. If you're the sort of founders about whom we'd say they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of dying. This growth rate is a bit uglier. Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.

Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. And the bigger you are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. It helped us to have Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. The fourth advantage of ramen profitability is a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep the sense of being very short, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company with a valuation any lower. If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do there than how much they get paid for it. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to invest two years in something that is industry best practice actually gets you is not the long but mistaken argument, but the most I've ever been able to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of wealth that can be created. For example, the corporate site that says the company makes enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.7 And so while you needed expressions for math to work, and if you get demoralized, don't give up on your dreams.8 Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is show, don't tell.

Notes

The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and b the second wave extends applications across the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the war had been with their company for more of the crown, and that modern corporate executives were, we should remember this when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a collection itself.

It would have a precise measure of the court. The kind of bug to find out why investors who say no for introductions to other knowledge. Many people have told me they do on the way and run the programs on the software business, and in a way to predict precisely what would our competitors hate most? Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential acquirers.

Plus ca change. Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

Common Lisp for, but I took so long. Digg is notorious for its shares will inevitably be something you need to learn to acknowledge as well as a result a lot better to get kids into better colleges, I mean efforts to manipulate them. The meanings of these people. You can get it, is that the Internet into situations where a great reputation and they're clearly working fast to get the money, but a big change from what it would be a good problem to have been fooled by the government to take a long thread are rarely seen, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what that means is we hope visited mostly by people like them—people who need the money.

Spices are also exempt. There are still, has one booked for them.

4%, and made more that year from stock options than any other company has ever been. Unfortunately the constraint probably has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's because of the company will either be a founder; and with that additional constraint, you usually have to pass so slowly for them, and that modern corporate executives were, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but the route to that mystery is that the government had little effect on what you call the market.

In technology, so they had that we should work like casual conversation.

A rolling close usually prevents this. We consciously optimize for this essay talks about the other hand, launching something small and use whatever advantages that brings. That makes some rich people move, and mostly in Perl, and the valuation of the most recent version of this desirable company, but I took so long to send them the final whistle, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev guys should be deprived of their time and became the twin centers from which they don't yet have any of the word that means having type II startups won't get you type I. Good and bad luck.

[thecomicsnexus]

THE GREAT DARKNESS SAGA LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #289-294 JULY - DECEMBER 1982 BY PAUL LEVITZ, KEITH GIFFEN, LARRY MAHLTSTEDT, BRUCE D. PATTERSON, CARMINE INFANTINO, CARL GAFFORD, HOWARD BENDER AND RODIN RODRIGUEZ

SYNOPSIS (FROM WIKIPEDIA AND DC DATABASE)

The Legion searches for its five members who are lost on an icy asteroid. Brainiac 5 and Element Lad attempt to cure Matter-Eater Lad's insanity, but fall victim to a renegade psychiatrist. 

Legion of Super-Heroes co-founder Cosmic Boy leads a group of Legionnaires to investigate attacks on the Museum of the Mystic Arts and the Tower of London, both located on Earth. Included in the squad is 20th-century member Superboy (the legendary Superman as a teenager) and the latest addition to the team—Jacques Foccart, the new Invisible Kid. At each site they are attacked by beings of great power, both of whom are shrouded in darkness and mention that they are servants of their "Master" who controls the "Great Darkness". Through the use of a teleportation warp, the beings escape with two stolen items: a mystical wand from the museum and the sword Excalibur from the Tower of London. When a third Servant attempts to steal the Orb of Orthanax from the Institute of Parapsychological Phenomena of Talok VIII, she is captured. However, a fourth Servant appears via another teleportation warp and absconds with the Orb. At his unknown base of operations, the Master absorbs the power contained within each of the stolen artifacts. The captured Servant is taken back to Legion headquarters. When she is brought in close proximity to Invisible Kid's younger sister Danielle Foccart, who has been possessed by the rogue artificial intelligence Computo, Danielle's brain activity spikes. In effect, the Servant causes the unconscious Computo to have a nightmare.

Through genetic testing, Mon-El and Dream Girl determine that the captured Servant is an inanimate "reverse-DNA" clone of Lydea Mallor, Shadow Lass' ancestor and a 20th-century heroine of Talok VIII. Meanwhile, on the planet Avalon, the fourth Servant frees the immensely powerful Mordru, the mightiest wizard in the universe and arguably the Legion's most powerful enemy. Just as Mordru is about to destroy the Servant, the Master appears and quickly defeats him. Shortly thereafter on the prison planet Takron-Galtos, the Legionnaires discover that the Time Trapper — another powerful Legion foe — has been drained of his cosmic time-manipulation abilities by the Master as well.

Dream Girl's precognitive abilities allow her to foresee the Servants attacking her sister, the sorceress known as the White Witch, on their homeworld Naltor. She and a squad of Legionnaires travel there and prevent one of the Servants from kidnapping the White Witch. During the attack, Invisible Kid seizes the opportunity to journey into one of the beings' teleportation warps and take the battle directly to the Master. He confronts the Master, who is amused by the notion that the young hero is presumptuous enough to confront him. The Master blasts him with energy beams from his eyes, and warps him back to Naltor. Having seen the Master's real face, Invisible Kid is frightened on such a fundamental level that a large stripe of his jet black hair turns white permanently.

In the midst of the crisis, the Legion holds its long-delayed election, choosing Dream Girl as its new leader. She leads a squad of Legionnaires to the Sorcerers' World, where they repel an attack by the Master and several of his Servants. Mon-El confronts the Master directly and immediately recognizes him, but is easily defeated. The Master then reads his mind, learning that Mon-El recognized him because of all that the Legionnaire witnessed during his many centuries in the Phantom Zone. Additionally, the Master learns of Mon-El's homeworld, Daxam. The sorcerers cast a spell intended to defend them against the Master, and they surprisingly conjure a humanoid baby. Meanwhile, on Earth, the three Legion founders (Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad) determine that two of the Servants are reverse-DNA clones of Superman and one of the Guardians of the Universe. Shocked that the Master is able to clone and harness the power of two of the mightiest beings in history, the founders send out a general alarm, calling all active and reserve Legionnaires to duty.

The Legionnaires manage to locate what turns out to be the Master's homeworld. Engaging the Servants in battle, Wildfire destroys the Guardian clone, while Element Lad exposes the Superman clone to gold kryptonite, allowing Timber Wolf to destroy him. Afterward, Brainiac 5 recognizes the Master’s homeworld, and is able to deduce his true identity. Meanwhile, the Master has travelled to Daxam. Having added the powers of Mordru, the Time Trapper and others to his own abilities, he transposes Daxam with his own homeworld. Consequently, Daxam's three billion natives each gain powers equal to those of Superman or Mon-El, and all of them fall under the thrall of the Master, who is determined to conquer the entire universe. At the villain's command, the Daxamites use their powers to physically reshape the planet until it has been sculpted in the image of the Master himself: the ancient New Gods tyrant, Darkseid.

Brainiac 5 is the only Legionnaire (other than Mon-El) with any knowledge of Darkseid or his homeworld, Apokolips. Once he briefs Dream Girl, she sends out a second general alarm to all of the Legion's super-powered allies, including Supergirl (who resides in the 20th century) and the Legion of Substitute Heroes. Throughout United Planets territory, the Kryptonian intelligence agent Dev-Em, the Heroes of Lallor, the Wanderers, the Substitute Heroes and the Legionnaires all struggle to hold back the onslaught of attacking Daxamites. On Takron-Galtos, a de-powered Chameleon Boy fends off an attack from a Daxamite child by using judo to toss him into a cell with Validus, the mysterious childlike creature who is the most powerful member of the Fatal Five.

As the humanoid child inexplicably ages at an accelerated rate, the White Witch casts a spell transporting the people on Daxam to Apokolips and vice versa. She is forcibly aided by a powerful unknown entity. When Darkseid tries to seize the child, the entity completes the aging process and reveals itself to be Darkseid's ancient enemy Izaya, Highfather of the New Gods from the planet New Genesis. Highfather transforms the last remaining Servant into a perfect clone of Darkseid’s son Orion, who is destined to someday destroy his father. Before fading into nothingness, Highfather summons Superboy and Supergirl to the battlefield above Apokolips, with his power allowing the Kryptonian cousins to maintain their abilities under a red sun. Darkseid destroys the Orion clone and sends Superboy back to the 20th century. He then becomes so preoccupied with battling Supergirl and the other Legionnaires that he loses mental control of the Daxamites, who begin to make their way toward the planet. Realizing that he cannot defeat three billion Daxamites, Darkseid concedes defeat and vanishes, taking Apokolips with him. As he departs, he declares that he has left the Legionnaires with the "curse of darkness" which will destroy them from within, promising "that which is purest of you shall be the first to go." In the aftermath of the crisis, the White Witch is inducted into the Legion, while Light Lass decides to quit.

REVIEW

This is perhaps the most famous Legion story, which doesn’t really speak well of the rest.

Perhaps at the time, having Darkseid in the future was unthinkable, but these days, we know he was involved in this saga, and even if you didn’t, the moment you pick up the trade, Darkseid is in the cover. That makes the “mystery” totally decompressed. We are hinted at the big reveal (that happens in the second to last issue) and in the meantime, we have the same fight over and over with Darkseid minions. Just in case you needed more clues, one of the minions is very recognizable as Orion.

I think they also cheated a little bit, making Boom tubes look different. For what I have read about the way Levitz used to write. His fight scenes were vaguely plotted, he was only interested in the soap opera plots. To be honest, I learned to skip most fight scenes in comics from 1941 to 1985. They just fill issues.

There are a couple of good things about this saga and I think those are the main reasons this story is so well remembered. One is Giffen and Mahltstedt style (Giffen would change his style later on). It actually fits the Kirby theme, but in the early issues, I can feel a George Perez vibe.

The other good thing is how these stories are starting to be less annoying. I don’t really want to talk shit about Levitz writing skills, because I know this was a tough job, and despite making mysteries last more than six months, he manages to have some kind individual story in each issue. Things like Lightning Lad being depressed and Chameleon Boy acting like a jerk lasted too long.

Another reason for the importance of this, is the surprise appearance of Darkseid. This was later parodied by Giffen itself in his Ambush Bug mini-series, where Darkseid would be revealed as the big bad in each issue. I can imagine that at the time, having the Legion fighting Darkseid was a big deal.

The reason I don’t think this is a great story is because it is very anti-climatic. Darkseid decides that he has been defeated and leaves. It doesn’t feel earned. And I know he leaves a curse on them, to be explored in the future, but that is a different arc.

All this aside, it actually brought some hope. Now that they know they can do great epic stories, perhaps they will continue doing so and I will find my greatest Legion story.

To do: Less repetition, simpler exposition, don’t plant mysteries to much ahead of the reveals.

I give this saga a score of 7

[writingonjorvik]

Can We Discuss Consistent Writing?

One of the big reasons that MMOs don’t often have a large number of translations of their games is in two parts: 1, translation and localization cost a lot of money & time, and 2, when the team is too focused on translating, they aren’t focusing on the writing being consistent. And this is what I want to talk about.

I know a lot of the mistakes with SSO is that their translations consistently have grammar errors. A lot. And there are still many that have not been fixed outside the coding errors being updated to actually put in the player’s name and not just “player.” A lot of this is likely due to when quests come out, there are a lot of eyes on the new quests, pointing out errors in the text. However, there aren’t a lot of eyes on older quests.

But grammar errors really aren’t the heart of it. There are definitely certain changes in the quests that the devs have made without going fully back and cleaning up. For instance, Loretta. I know this one is a common complaint, but the change in her dialogue is aggressively bad. She goes from mild popular girl to full on mean girl in the blink of an eye. And it’s not even like an early change. It’s in the middle of the level slough around 11-13, pretty late into her character being established. And as an older player, it feels weird to see that change. Really, for any experienced reader, it’s an obvious change.

And this whole situation gives SSO a poor presentation to new players, particularly for anyone on the older end of their target age range, and definitely for those above. It makes SSO seem like this cheap production without spellcheck instead of the whole “biggest horse MMO in the world” bit that the devs are so proud of. Compounded be a number of visual bugs that can still occur in the beginning quests, it doesn’t make SSO seem like the best place to sink your money. You’d think the devs would be more focused on fixing the things that the player is first exposed to, but...nothing in those quests have changed in quite some time.

One would hope that this improves, right? Well, no, and it fails in threefold. First, there are still typos throughout the quests. Fewer, but still a number. The bigger problem is problems like that of Loretta, the devs consistently change styles while writing. Nothing has big as Loretta’s personality shift, but definitely style changes. The worst example of this is the “:O” moment in the main story quests. Don’t get me wrong, that moment was funny the first time as a player, but as a writer. It’s gross. It’s an utter lacking of writing in the moment, and an absolute waste of effort on the part of the devs. Seriously! This is a main story quest, the entire drive of a story driven game, and they’re wasting time making cheap emoji jokes.

And this goes into the second issue. The devs cannot decide who they’re writing for. Originally, I think they did when they were still a small team. Some people may not know this, but the original version of the quests around the Vineyard cursed. Yeah, “damn” has canonically been in SSO before. And now the devs can’t decide if they’re writing a game aimed for kids or a kid’s game. And that is a distinct different. Compare a good kids movie to a middling one. A good kids movie is just a good movie without adult topics. Pixar, How To Train Your Dragon, Studio Ghibli, all great movies. And then we move to middling to bad kids movies. A lot of them rely on some of fart joke, usually inserted without context to even attempt to make it funny. Pandering to kids for laughs and not really making an effort. SSO used to have writing that I would say leaned towards the first. Now they lean heavily on the latter. Not in fart jokes, but in stories that pander to cliche “teen girl game” tropes. There is no consistent feel in SSO. The story has a mostly consistent feel, but the world? No, there is no commonality in the writing style of SSO.

Third though is probably the most obvious on replaying, but it’s also not too uncommon in MMOs. And to be fair, MMOs are big undertakings. However, if you’ve played the quests with Pi where she has to make a potion for you, she’ll comment while you’re waiting that Moorland is under construction. And it was, when that quest came out. Now it’s not. This is a common problem, and I imagine it will be a much bigger problem as the devs are moving into different kinds of festival quests, quests that used to loosely reference parts of the world.  There are pockets of missing story all over SSO’s world, pockets of missing personalities, and unanswered questions. And it’s these pockets that make so many loose threads in SSO’s story.

The best thing the devs could do is put more effort into reviewing these quests on an internal level. I imagine having an account that can skip around quests on command would help with this. Overall, one would think that in a game focused on story, and I’d prefer if the devs focused more on that over weekly content releases. Quality over quantity, you know? A potentially better option for the devs could be to get a pool of beta players who are given new accounts and asked to document the story for places of grammatically errors, and also where things could be improve to prevent those holes. Supposing the devs don’t go that direction, more players should be reporting early level errors on their playthroughs to help fix the situation for new players.

Like I said, this is a story focused game. The story should be much better focused. Hopefully moving forward the devs will actually bring on a proper writer to do this, but there are certainly places they need to fix in their older quests before they focus on releasing in even more quests. After all, they need recommendations across language barriers, so if the original texts aren’t proofed, what are we going to tell new players? As a writer, it’s just a little insulting to see the devs putting so little effort into keeping their writing consistent. As someone who sees games as art, it’s disappointing to see them caring so little about their craft over making a profit.

[zoids-whisper-blog]

                                 Chapter Two: Dark Skies

Alise is still missing, Juno still insists on going after her and Pana, despite what she says, is still not fine.  Chapter Two begins immediately where chapter one left off.

But this time, the stakes are much higher.  Skies has come out of the shadows and is wreaking havoc as he pleases.  Pana wants to pursue Alise into Dunraven, but it will be impossible unless Sylvanr is able to gain some ground on her brother, Skies.  Her extended babysitting adventure has now grown into fighting a territory war with two deities.

Meanwhile, the Village of Songs is slowly regaining a sense of normalcy after the attacks preceding chapter one.  Whispers are leaving their huts and venturing out into the world again...A world which is in serious need of rebuilding.

https://rpgmaker.net/games/6250/downloads/10130/ ---

The game has been up for several hours, but I was too exhausted to type up patch notes or anything like that.  Now I have.  Given the amount of time that's elapsed since the last patch, the extreme loss of old files and documentation, and my own fallible memory, I cannot hope to provide full patch notes.  Please accept these partial notes instead.  I will provide further notes once I've been able to sort things out, but there's no need to delay release for that. Some patch notes may have been for things in v1.2...but I had them down for a version v1.3 that never seems to have been released?  Who knows... ---

-After reaching a certain point in chapter two, players will be able to (finally) construct additional zoids.  As I said in an earlier post, this will initially be limited to four new zoids (Sabre Tiger, Red Horn, Lightning Saix, König Wolf).  However, unlike I said in an earlier post, these zoids will not be pilot restricted.  You are free to put Adele in a Sabre Tiger, if you so wish.  In addition, pilots can swap into existing zoids.  Pana can pilot Juno's Stone Fuhrer if you so desire.

I plan to add additional zoids.  Just like last time I mentioned this, the change-over system has been updated to make adding zoids easier.  At the same time, they all require animations, updates to Link Attack code to make sure Adele isn't sniping people in a gunless Sabre Tiger, and so on.

-I've created a new way of coding menus which makes it much easier to offer choices (as many as I want) to players with the flexibility of easily adding/removing choices based on various circumstances.  I didn't have time to roll this out completely, but players can see it during pilot switching and in a certain post-chapter Tribute Shop.  Plans are underway to update Isaac and other NPCs.

-Mathilde Gavrielle has been updated with what will eventually be the new method of coding NPCs.  This means that, whenever she appears, she largely uses the same code.  While this may not seem like it matters since I achieved the same effect with massive juggling of flags and variables before, it means that it will now be much easier to have NPCs move about the world without introducing bugs, breaking quests or eating up Dev time.  Expect mobile NPCs in a future update...I want to make this world come alive.

-As always, Sylvanr has more variety in Statue speaking bits, Pana has more variety with plant healing speaking bits and Juno has slightly more variety with plant healing speaking bits.

-Sylvanr's Rage was a good technical skill on paper, but the bulk of its power was in debuffing enemies in an AoE.  Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily come across to players.  Rage now debuffs enemies so hard that it can't be missed.  It is now sufficiently powerful for a Link Attack.

-Juno's Sylvanr's Fury has a new animation.  More animation updates coming, but they take time and I didn't want to delay over that.  Feel free to speculate as to why I did this obscure skill first...I sure don't have a clue.

-Ursula may have been completely reworked.  I honestly don't remember if that rework went out in patch 1.2.  Anyway, it's been so long since that happened (for me) that I can't really give you an accurate step-by-step comparison with her original form.  Her new Bear focuses on locking down a single target and doing moderate turn-1 damage as opposed to buffing up to deal damage later.  

-Juno's Hope is now an instant skill.  This should give it a wider use case, hopefully.

-The main menu is now a Ring of Flowers.  I want to do more with this (like show Sylphs somewhere), but I didn't want to risk blowing up the stability of the build by mucking around with menu coding in the eleventh hour.

-The Quest Log has become the Notebook.  It has been largely re-coded to prevent crashes, now contains more quests and is generally more useful than before.

-Christopher and Leeland's Shield of Love link attack was mistakenly firing 64 times instead of 8.  Whoops.

-Christopher and Leeland's Strike Hyacinth included 3 attack actions for Christopher.  In light of new changes that make basic attacks stronger in general, this became a little over the top.  To prevent Christopher from being able to make 54 attacks with this skill, the number of attack actions has been dropped to 2.  Enjoy your 36 attack combos though, if that's your thing.

-Leeland's Divine Stratagem fizzled out if the player did not pick a support skill in time.  It now uses the main skill with no support, if possible, and a minor plan B skill if not.

-Juno's supports in Divine Stratagem were sometimes using the wrong skill due to a bit of database reordering.  She has been un-addled.

-Some Link attacks involving multiple enemy targets resulted in characters each targeting a different enemy.  They will now display coordination worthy of the vanguard.

-Leeland's DS: Strike Lily with Christopher support caused Christopher to use the original Double Time instead of Double Time II even if he had learned the latter.  This led to silly situations where Christopher could attack all day long.  No more.

-Pana and Juno's Sylvanr's Resolve link prayer was available for use even if they were not in the party together or if one of their systems was frozen.  Now it isn't.  Also, the buff it imparts lasts 1 turn longer so that Godspeed isn't necessary to get some use out of it.

-Pana's Atalanta formation was doing good work, but wasn't in line with the strength of other formations due to how low Agility values are compared to other stats and the relatively few places where it applies.  It now gives a 300% Agility boost instead of 200%.

-Adele has a new skill available after she has Taken Cover: Emerge.  She steps out of cover and gains 30 AD.  

-After the player reached a certain level of strength, Core Coating stones stopped working, maybe.  Now they work at all times, definitely.

-The Ill-Fitting tunic says that it increases the players AD gain rate.  Instead, it just made enemy zoids want to attack the wearer more often.  It is now a tunic of its word.

-If Sylvanr caused a storm to occur in certain maps, the screen would become too dark to see anything on.  This particular interaction will no longer occur on those maps.

-Previously, a System Freeze while in formation would cause the affected pilot to drop formation until the skill was used again.  Now, they should drop back into place as soon as they're back online.

[aion-rsa]

Can Cyberpunk 2077 Bring Fans Back with an Apology, a Patch Roadmap, and a Multiplayer Mode?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Much has already been written about Cyberpunk 2077‘s successes and failures. Is the game a financial success? Well, according to developer CD Projekt Red, the game sold over 13 million copies in its first two weeks despite being removed from the PlayStation Store, one of the industry’s biggest digital marketplaces. So yes. But has the game also turned out to be a PR and legal nightmare? Undoubtedly.

The buggy state of the game, especially on last-gen consoles, dominated the discussion surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. So huge was the quality gap between the PC version that CD Projekt showcased in promotional footage and the versions released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One that several outlets ultimately judged them separately, with the PC version receiving stellar review scores while the last-gen versions received remarkably low scores for a AAA release.

Compounding the issue was the fact that reviewers were only given access to the PC version ahead of the embargo, and while many outlets mentioned bugs in their reviews, the PC game didn’t really reflect the much more broken state of the last-gen versions. The non-disclosure agreement sent to reviewers also prevented outlets from using their own captured footage for their videos, forcing them to use marketing B-roll provided by the studio instead. Customers were effectively left to discover the bugs on their own after they’d pre-ordered or bought the game at launch.

Some have accused CD Projekt of purposely misleading customers, reviewers, and investors. In fact, two lawsuits have already been filed against the company, which claim that the studio made false statements and misled investors about the state of the game. (For example, two weeks before launch, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kacinski told investors that the game ran “surprisingly well” on last-gen consoles.) On top of all that is the general outcry from fans who feel cheated by a studio that had promised them an incredible experience no matter which platform they played the game on.

If the studio hoped to command the attention of the gaming world with its highly-anticipated follow-up to The Witcher 3, it certainly achieved that. After releasing several hotfixes for the game in an attempt to remedy Cyberpunk 2077‘s most egregious bugs, CD Projekt took things one step further by posting an apology video that sought to explain the days leading up to Cyberpunk 2077‘s controversial launch. (I almost wrote “disastrous launch,” but, again, the game sold 13 million copies in two weeks.)

Dear gamers, Below, you’ll find CD PROJEKT’s co-founder’s personal explanation of what the days leading up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 looked like, sharing the studio’s perspective on what happened with the game on old-generation consoles. pic.twitter.com/XjdCKizewq

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) January 13, 2021

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“Despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted to meet,” admitted CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski in the video. “I, and the entire leadership team, are deeply sorry for this, and this video is me publicly owning up to that.”

Iwinski went on to explain how the studio underestimated its goal of “wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles — especially old-gens.” He explained that the dev team had to “constantly improve our in-game streaming system for old-gen consoles” once they made changes to the PC version. Ultimately, Iwinski said, the team thought that whatever bugs and issues were left on last-gen platforms could be ironed out in a “final day zero update.”

“We were fighting for quality on old-gen until the very last moment, and every extra day of us working on the day zero update brought visible improvement,” Iwiński said. “This is why we started sending console review keys on the 8th of December [two days before launch], which was later than originally planned.” (Den of Geek only received a PC review code the day before launch.)

Furthermore, Iwinski claimed in the video that “our testing did not show a big part of the issues,” which is hard to believe when you look at the sheer scope of the glitches, some of which go way beyond minor visual or audio bugs. In fact, a report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who talked to 20 current and former CD Projekt employees, refuted that claim, saying that the studio was aware of the extent of the issues as launch day approached and decided to release the game anyway.

If you haven’t seen the performance issues for yourself, GameSpot compiled quite a few of the game’s bugs in the video below:

Beyond apologies and explanations, the CD Projekt video is also a clear attempt to move the conversation forward. Iwinski closed the video by revealing Cyberpunk 2077‘s 2021 development roadmap, which will kick off a year of updates aimed at turning the game around. Two patches will bring further fixes to the game — the first will be out in late January, with the second patch coming “in the following weeks.” Free DLC originally planned for release soon after launch will now drop after the patches on undisclosed dates. The next-gen console upgrade for PS5and XSX owners will follow in the second half of 2021, although it was also originally scheduled for much earlier than that.

While the video still leaves many questions yet to be answered — none of the updates beyond the first patch even have proper roll out dates, for example — one of the biggest ones is whether these future patches and updates will really be enough to put fans back in the studio’s corner. Could the next-gen upgrade spark a No Man’s Sky-level second life for Cyberpunk 2077, bringing back players who dropped the last-gen version?

Cyberpunk 2077 might be facing an uphill battle. The game has suffered a drastic drop in player count on Steam since launch, according to a report by game stats watchdog GitHyp (via GameSpot), losing 79% of players in just three weeks. A steep drop in player count after launch isn’t all that surprising for a single-player game that can be completed in 25-30 hours but it took CD Projekt’s previous game, The Witcher 3, three months to see an equivalent drop in player count on Steam.

It’s also impossible to know what kind of monetary hit the game has taken from refunds requested by angry Xbox and PlayStation owners. But on the surface, it may seem that many fans have already abandoned the title, even on Twitch, where only about 3,000 viewers are still watching streamers play the game as of this writing.

Yet, the game still has its fans, including some of Den of Geek’s own writers, who named the title one of the best of 2020 (I disagree with them). And there are those on the internet who are already anxiously digging through the game to see what might be next in terms of DLC. Recently, a dataminer uncovered references to Cyberpunk 2077‘s upcoming multiplayer component in the game’s code, including mentions of Deathmatch and a Heists mode, as well as player classes, lobbies, and more.

There’s no doubt that a shiny new multiplayer mode will bring some players back to Night City, although the studio also plans to use the mode to usher in microtransactions, which could lead to more controversies for the studio down the line. While gamers as a whole are hardly as anti-microtransaction as some claim the community to be — AAA games that push in-game purchases continue to fly off shelves after all — a monetization fiasco is hardly something CD Projekt will want to deal with once the work to fix the single-player component is finished. After the game’s botched launch from a publicity and performance standpoint, CD Projekt will have to be extra careful about the future of Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk multiplayer/online, which is a separate project, will have some microtransactions, but we said that a year ago already. Like always, expect us treating your money with respect.

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) September 7, 2020

“Like always, expect us treating your money with respect,” CD Projekt said back in September 2020 regarding the game’s future microtransactions rollout. The studio’s fans, still enamored with The Witcher 3, the company’s outwardly consumer-friendly attitude, and Keanu Reeves, had fewer reasons to doubt that promise then. But this was just a few weeks before Bloomberg reported that the studio had implemented a crunch period of mandatory 6-day work weeks despite previously promising not to do so. CD Projekt’s image with the public and its investors has only deteriorated further since then.

In the eyes of many, the CD Projekt that published that apology video last week is a far more unreliable company than it was a year ago. Regardless of whether or not you believe Iwinski skewed further away from the truth by claiming CD Projekt wasn’t aware of all the bugs in the game ahead of launch, the co-founder certainly painted a picture of a studio that is far more timid about committing to anything, such as rollout dates (or even release windows) for its 2021 roadmap or concrete details about the DLC and multiplayer mode it already promised its fans. Just how long are fans willing to wait for CD Projekt to make good on what vague promises it has made for the future?

At the end of the day, CD Projekt’s situation is not without precedent. No Man’s Sky‘s Hello Games suffered a similar fall from grace in 2016 after failing to make good on its more ambitious promises to fans, while Square Enix had to reboot Final Fantasy XIV after the MMORPG’s disastrous launch in 2010. Both games have since made well-received comebacks. CD Projekt could turn things around too, and even regain the trust of its fans and investors, but Cyberpunk 2077‘s controversial launch also means it will be a long time before the company’s leadership can really say with any certainty that it will treat your money with respect. In fact, it may take even longer than Cyberpunk 2077‘s roadmap.

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[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 17 Week in Ethereum News

As noted last week, I’ve started to think of this as the “Eth holder, but doesn’t work in the industry” edition, so we kick it off with the high-level things I’d read beyond just what you can read.  So, for example, Gnosis/OpenEthereum is picking up the Parity client, but you can see that without me highlighting it.

So here’s my highlight of high-level things for Eth holders.

Some interesting findings in ConsenSys’s eth2 staking survey

Visa patent shows they are building on Ethereum

Building on ethtrader’s DONUT, Reddit unveils community points for r/fortniteBR and r/cryptocurrency subreddits. At the moment, 9000 wallets created for fortnite and just 2100 for r/cryptocurrency. Currently on Rinkeby testnet with plans to move to mainnet.

JPMorganChase decides to bank Coinbase and Gemini

ErisX launches ETH futures, physically delivered, monthly and quarterly contracts

dydx’s BTC/USDC perpetual with 10x leverage is open to the public

This BTC/USDC perpetual matters because the crypto market has been overtaken by YOLO gambling on centralized exchanges that probably trade against you as they know liquidation points and no one else does.   Not a surprise, dydx’s founder says this is already the #1 most traded DeFi.   Centralized exchanges get hacked all the time - not your keys not your crypto.  DeFi is an improvement.

We finally have Eth futures!  And they’re physically delivered, which is good.  Though physical delivery requirements can lead to strange consequences (eg,negative price of oil last month!), it keeps traders honest and moors the price to the actual asset.

JPMorganChase finally banking some crypto clients is an important step for the space.

Reddit is testing letting subreddits govern themselves and pay for things using an Eth token.  Very cool

Visa patented their method of digitizing dollars on Eth at the same time that their chairman said at a conference that “digital currencies could be additive to the payments ecosystem” and that they “supported” them.

In September 2018, the same Visa chairman said that “[blockchain] isn’t really at its core, for us, a good technology.”

It’s interesting that even as the crypto market continued to wane, Visa realized they needed to try to get ahead of the curve.   Crypto isn’t dead.

Eth1

Geth v1.9.14 – unindex and save disk space

OpenEthereum v3. Formerly the Parity client. Support for eth/64, breaking database changes to save disk space. Deprecating light client, auto updater, and private transactions

cross-client consensus tests v7

Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes from the call, largely around EIPs for next hard fork, eg: 2315 (evm subroutines), 2537 (precompile for curve in eth2), 2046 (reduce gas for static calls to precompiles) and 2565 (repricing the 198 precompile)

EVM+384 bit arithmetic as an alternative to EIP2537’s precompile

Discussion of a second method for resource accounting alongside gas: oil from Suhabe Bugrara, separately formulated as karma from Martin Swende. Or a counterproposal from Vitalik: per account gas limits

The case for Eth-collateralized tokenized gas at the protocol level

So the first real release of the fka Parity client.  Very cool, client diversity is important and to my knowledge there are no large scale miners running anything but the Go and Rust clients, so this is important.

What’s up with the “second method of resource accounting alongside gas?”  The idea is that stateless Eth will need a substantially different gas schedule for block witnesses, yet we don’t want to break existing contracts.  We want backward compatibility without overly complicating the dev experience.  Not an easy problem, hence the debate about the best way to do it.

Meanwhile there’s a bit of a debate about some of what goes into the next hard fork.  Relatively normal stuff, some folks think we should stop doing all these precompiles (eg, bit arithmetic proposal), others think we should only do the general precompile EIP

Eth2

Latest what’s new in eth2, featuring Ben’s thoughts on timelines

Latest eth2 implementer call. Notes from Ben and Mamy, targeting June for the multi-client testnet

Schlesi testnet: Teku is fully participating and Nimbus is almost fully syncing, though there was a chain split this weekend

Proof of custody through occasional checks and slashing

Stethoscope: networking test suite

Idea from Justin Drake on putting price feed oracles in eth2 via validators, and a counter-proposal from Vitalik Buterin

The Schlesi testnet went down, but overall it has been quite stable.  Nothing terribly unexpected for a testnet, and Lodestar will soon be the 5th client to join up.  Slow and steady progress.

Price feed oracles got quite a bit of pushback, I think some of this is because stablecoins are having their second renaissance - something I’ll touch on later.

Proof of custody (ie, that you as a validator hold the data you say you do) through a Truebit-like game: to prevent lazy attestations, the protocol will guarantee false things, and if validators don’t point it out, then they get slashed.  

Layer2

What are the true finality guarantees of state channels? Depends on liveness of layer 1 chain

We often say that state channels offer “instant finality” but this is a bit of a shorthand to say that it offers “instant finality” assuming that the underlying basechain has “liveness” (which is just blockchain-speak for “is producing blocks”)

This newsletter is made possible by Trail of Bits!

Trail of Bits recently reported and fixed 12 security issues in projects across Ethereum, some of them critical. Read more about what they were and how they found them in Bug Hunting with Crytic.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.8, some important bugfixes

Using immutables in Solidity v0.6.xx

Austin Griffith tutorial: build smart contract wallet with social recovery using React

If you haven’t watched Austin’s wtf is eth.build video, you should. It’s under 3 minutes, funny, and informative.

Running the Incubed light client with Python

OpenZeppelin Contracts v3, but modified to be safe for upgrades

Mainnet testing with your own node using Brownie

headlong: ABI v2 and RLP for the JVM

EthPM v3 – spec for v3 of Eth package manager is in last call

12 bugs found by Trail of Bits’ Crytic tool using 90+ detectors

Verifiable randomness on-chain using the Chainlink VRF

Austin’s eth.build explainer vid is great.  Truly recommended - as a community we should be trying to get this in front of many devs as possible.   

How long until someone wins a hackathon with eth.build + oneclickdapp or dapphero?   Seems possible.

Chainlink VRF seems quite cool; PoolTogether is already integrating it.

Ecosystem

Tornado.cash finished the largest trusted setup ceremony to date, operator soon to be set to null

Some interesting findings in ConsenSys’s eth2 staking survey

A guide to building with MACI – an anti-collusion demo using SNARKs

And Tornado did burn the admin keys between then and now.

Enterprise

Visa patent shows they are building on Ethereum

Where to use the Baseline protocol: sharing business process automation with counterparties

Brave releases Mjolnir tool for easy deploying and benchmarking permissioned Eth chains

Brave is going to move their token to a separate chain, presumably with a bridge.  Doesn’t seem like terrible news to me, if you have a small amount of BAT, you don’t need a strong censorship-resistance guarantee.

Application layer

Building on ethtrader’s DONUT, Reddit unveils community points for r/fortniteBR and r/cryptocurrency subreddits. At the moment, 9000 wallets created for fortnite and just 2100 for r/cryptocurrency. Currently on Rinkeby testnet with plans to move to mainnet.

Dfinity’s first Swiss employee Robert Lauko now working on Liquity stablecoin, low collateralization with algorithmic liquidation via stability pool

“Augur v2 core contracts are finalized and in a code-freeze state, and the trading UI is undergoing performance testing”

Aave changes its interest rate model. Inflection point in the curve now 8% and 90% usage.

Kyber hit 1 billion USD worth of trades

Brave at 14m MAU/5m DAU

Sai successfully shut down on May 12 and now is redeemable for ETH

Hasu: the future of cryptomoney is central banking. An analysis of Maker’s options and decisions

Utah County (Provo) in Utah offering marriage licenses certified with the hash on Eth mainnet

dydx’s BTC/USDC perpetual with 10x leverage is open to the public, and compares centralized and decentralized perpetual markets

Lots of cool stuff, some of which touched on above.   Utah County is not the first local government to do something like this, but as far as I could tell, it was new.   That must have been a hard sale with the crypto hope at a relative nadir.   Amusingly their site was not https (not that I should judge, I’ve been lazy about that myself, usually do to my cheapness in finding hosts...ahem Tumblr)

Brave growth keeps going.  It really is a superior product, it always surprises me that there are some in crypto who doesn’t use it.

One interesting trend is that we’re having a bit of a renaissance in projects trying to compete with Maker.  Of course Synthetix has had quite a bit of success, though previous rounds contained some laughable attempts (Basecoin).   Stablecoins have a large design space with lots of risks to tradeoff.  I think the new wave of stablecoin designs has some interesting ideas.  I think there’s plenty of space for more people to be successful, though I think plenty of folks are underrrating how hard it will be to compete with Maker.

Overall this felt like a good week for the app layer section, and my usual arbitrary “how much is DeFi? metric comes in at 6/10

Tokens/Business/Regulation

ErisX launches ETH futures, physically delivered, monthly and quarterly contracts

Now ~2300 WBTC on Eth versus 900 BTC on Lightning

RAC’s $TAPE launched on Zora and went from $20 to $1000. $TAPE is a token redeemable for a special edition cassette of RAC’s latest album. Interesting new model for artists to capture value

I guess “days, not weeks” dies as an Ethereum meme?   Or maybe it’s like wooks and TwoWeeks, and it will live forever.

(if you don’t catch the reference, there before Eth shipped in july 2015, there was 18 months of Bitcoiners claiming that it was vaporware that was impossible and would never ship, and the eternal answer was always that the ship date was “two weeks” away....which became “two wooks” because the internet is wonderfully weird).

Meanwhile BTC keeps migrating to ETH, as the Bitcoin chain is too limited and fundamentally unsustainable so if you want to do anything with your orange memecoin, then you have to use Ethereum.

Loved seeing RAC’s $TAPE do well.  While critics say this is gimmicky and perhaps not replicable, I actually tend to think the opposite.  Many artists have huge fans who would pay insane amounts - artists have never done a great job at giving their fans new experiences and capturing value.  

General

JPMorganChase decides to bank Coinbase and Gemini

Wired’s story on MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins, from stopping WannaCry to FBI arrest

the main idea in HALO snark construction

Open cryptography problems: improving stealth addresses and ideal vector commitment

I love how the general section is such a mismash of the deepest crypto things and then human interest stories like about Marcus Hutchins.  The Wired writer bought his story - I tend to think it’s probably slightly more complicated

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the calendar.  I’m not excited about virtual conferences and VR.  But maybe some of you are?

That’s all for this week in the annotated edition.  If you made it this far, would you tweet about it or RT this?   https://www.evanvanness.com/post/618575234233204736/annotated-edition-of-may-17-week-in-ethereum-news

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter, usually forthcoming in a day or so, as well as a real-time source of Eth news.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-17-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 18 – Book of Swarm launch

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 26 – last day to apply for Ethereum India fellowship

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[cybercrew]

Nmap Defcon Release! 80+ improvements include new NSE scripts/libs, new Npcap, etc.

Fellow hackers, I'm here in Las Vegas for Defcon and delighted to release Nmap 7.80.  It's the first formal Nmap release in more than a year, and I hope you find it worth the wait! The main reason for the delay is that we've been working so hard on our Npcap Windows packet capturing driver.  As many of you know, Windows Nmap traditionally depended on Winpcap for packet capture.  That is great software, but it has been discontinued and has seen no updates since 2013. It doesn't always work on Windows 10, and it depends on long-deprecated Windows API's that Microsoft could remove at any time.  So we've spent the last few years building our own Npcap raw packet capturing/sending driver, starting with Winpcap as the base.  It uses modern APIs and is more performant as well as more secure and more featureful.  We've had 15 Npcap releases since Nmap 7.70 and we're really happy with where it is now.  Even Wireshark switched to Npcap recently.  More details on Npcap can be found at https://npcap.org. But Windows users aren't the only ones benefiting from this new Nmap release.  It includes 80+ cross-platform improvements you can read about below, including 11 new NSE scripts, a bunch of new libraries, bug fixes and performance improvements. map 7.80 source code and binary packages for Linux, Windows, and Mac are available for free download from the usual spot: https://nmap.org/download.html If you find any bugs in this release, please let us know on the Nmap Dev list or bug tracker as described at https://nmap.org/book/man-bugs.html. Here is the full list of significant changes since 7.70: map 7.70 source code and binary packages for Linux, Windows, and Mac are available for free download from the usual spot: https://nmap.org/download.html If you find any bugs in this release, please let us know on the Nmap Dev list or bug tracker as described at https://nmap.org/book/man-bugs.html. Here is the full list of significant changes: o [Windows] The Npcap Windows packet capturing library (https://npcap.org/)  is faster and more stable than ever. Nmap 7.80 updates the bundled Npcap  from version 0.99-r2 to 0.9982, including all of these changes from the  last 15 Npcap releases: https://nmap.org/npcap/changelog o [NSE] Added 11 NSE scripts, from 8 authors, bringing the total up to 598!  They are all listed at https://nmap.org/nsedoc/, and the summaries are  below:  + [GH#1232] broadcast-hid-discoveryd discovers HID devices on a LAN by    sending a discoveryd network broadcast probe. [Brendan Coles]  + [GH#1236] broadcast-jenkins-discover discovers Jenkins servers on a LAN    by sending a discovery broadcast probe. [Brendan Coles]  + [GH#1016][GH#1082] http-hp-ilo-info extracts information from HP    Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) servers. [rajeevrmenon97]  + [GH#1243] http-sap-netweaver-leak detects SAP Netweaver Portal with the    Knowledge Management Unit enabled with anonymous access. [ArphanetX]  + https-redirect detects HTTP servers that redirect to the same port, but    with HTTPS. Some nginx servers do this, which made ssl-* scripts not run    properly. [Daniel Miller]  + [GH#1504] lu-enum enumerates Logical Units (LU) of TN3270E servers.    [Soldier of Fortran]  + [GH#1633] rdp-ntlm-info extracts Windows domain information from RDP    services. [Tom Sellers]  + smb-vuln-webexec checks whether the WebExService is installed and allows    code execution. [Ron Bowes]  + smb-webexec-exploit exploits the WebExService to run arbitrary commands    with SYSTEM privileges. [Ron Bowes]  + [GH#1457] ubiquiti-discovery extracts information from the Ubiquiti    Discovery service and assists version detection. [Tom Sellers]  + [GH#1126] vulners queries the Vulners CVE database API using CPE    information from Nmap's service and application version detection.    [GMedian, Daniel Miller] o [GH#1291][GH#34][GH#1339] Use pcap_create instead of pcap_live_open in  Nmap, and set immediate mode on the pcap descriptor. This solves packet  loss problems on Linux and may improve performance on other platforms.  [Daniel Cater, Mike Pontillo, Daniel Miller] o [NSE] Collected utility functions for string processing into a new  library, stringaux.lua. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] New rand.lua library uses the best sources of random available on  the system to generate random strings. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] New library, oops.lua, makes reporting errors easy, with plenty of  debugging detail when needed, and no clutter when not. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] Collected utility functions for manipulating and searching tables  into a new library, tableaux.lua. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] New knx.lua library holds common functions and definitions for  communicating with KNX/Konnex devices. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE][GH#1571] The HTTP library now provides transparent support for gzip-  encoded response body. (See https://github.com/nmap/nmap/pull/1571 for an  overview.) [nnposter] o [Nsock][Ncat][GH#1075] Add AF_VSOCK (Linux VM sockets) functionality to  Nsock and Ncat. VM sockets are used for communication between virtual  machines and the hypervisor. [Stefan Hajnoczi] o [Security][Windows] Address CVE-2019-1552 in OpenSSL by building with the  prefix "C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap\OpenSSL". This should prevent  unauthorized users from modifying OpenSSL defaults by writing  configuration to this directory. o [Security][GH#1147][GH#1108] Reduced LibPCRE resource limits so that  version detection can't use as much of the stack. Previously Nmap could  crash when run on low-memory systems against target services which are  intentionally or accidentally difficult to match. Someone assigned  CVE-2018-15173 for this issue. [Daniel Miller] o [GH#1361] Deprecate and disable the -PR (ARP ping) host discovery  option. ARP ping is already used whenever possible, and the -PR option  would not force it to be used in any other case. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] bin.lua is officially deprecated. Lua 5.3, added 2 years ago in Nmap  7.25BETA2, has native support for binary data packing via string.pack and  string.unpack. All existing scripts and libraries have been updated.  [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] Completely removed the bit.lua NSE library. All of its functions are  replaced by native Lua bitwise operations, except for `arshift`  (arithmetic shift) which has been moved to the bits.lua library. [Daniel  Miller] o [NSE][GH#1571] The HTTP library is now enforcing a size limit on the  received response body. The default limit can be adjusted with a script  argument, which applies to all scripts, and can be overridden case-by-case  with an HTTP request option. (See https://github.com/nmap/nmap/pull/1571  for details.)  [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1648] CR characters are no longer treated as illegal in script  XML output. [nnposter] o [GH#1659] Allow resuming nmap scan with lengthy command line [Clément  Notin] o [NSE][GH#1614] Add TLS support to rdp-enum-encryption. Enables determining  protocol version against servers that require TLS and lays ground work for  some NLA/CredSSP information collection. [Tom Sellers] o [NSE][GH#1611] Address two protocol parsing issues in rdp-enum-encryption  and the RDP nse library which broke scanning of Windows XP. Clarify  protocol types [Tom Sellers] o [NSE][GH#1608] Script http-fileupload-exploiter failed to locate its  resource file unless executed from a specific working  directory. [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1467] Avoid clobbering the "severity" and "ignore_404" values of  fingerprints in http-enum. None of the standard fingerprints uses these  fields. [Kostas Milonas] o [NSE][GH#1077] Fix a crash caused by a double-free of libssh2 session data  when running SSH NSE scripts against non-SSH services. [Seth Randall] o [NSE][GH#1565] Updates the execution rule of the mongodb scripts to be  able to run on alternate ports. [Paulino Calderon] o [Ncat][GH#1560] Allow Ncat to connect to servers on port 0, provided that  the socket implementation allows this. [Daniel Miller] o Update the included libpcap to 1.9.0. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE][GH#1544] Fix a logic error that resulted in scripts not honoring the  smbdomain script-arg when the target provided a domain in the NTLM  challenge.  [Daniel Miller] o [Nsock][GH#1543] Avoid a crash (Protocol not supported) caused by trying  to reconnect with SSLv2 when an error occurs during DTLS connect. [Daniel  Miller] o [NSE][GH#1534] Removed OSVDB references from scripts and replaced them  with BID references where possible. [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1504] Updates TN3270.lua and adds argument to disable TN3270E  [Soldier of Fortran] o [GH#1504] RMI parser could crash when encountering invalid input [Clément  Notin] o [GH#863] Avoid reporting negative latencies due to matching an ARP or ND  response to a probe sent after it was recieved. [Daniel Miller] o [Ncat][GH#1441] To avoid confusion and to support non-default proxy ports,  option --proxy now requires a literal IPv6 address to be specified using  square-bracket notation, such as --proxy [2001:db8::123]:456. [nnposter] o [Ncat][GH#1214][GH#1230][GH#1439] New ncat option provides control over  whether proxy destinations are resolved by the remote proxy server or  locally, by Ncat itself. See option --proxy-dns. [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1478] Updated script ftp-syst to prevent potential endless  looping.  [nnposter] o [GH#1454] New service probes and match lines for v1 and v2 of the Ubiquiti  Discovery protocol. Devices often leave the related service open and it  exposes significant amounts of information as well as the risk of being  used as part of a DDoS. New nmap-payload entry for v1 of the  protocol. [Tom Sellers] o [NSE] Removed hostmap-ip2hosts.nse as the API has been broken for a while  and the service was completely shutdown on Feb 17th, 2019. [Paulino  Calderon] o [NSE][GH#1318] Adds TN3270E support and additional improvements to  tn3270.lua and updates tn3270-screen.nse to display the new  setting. [mainframed] o [NSE][GH#1346] Updates product codes and adds a check for response length  in enip-info.nse. The script now uses string.unpack. [NothinRandom] o [Ncat][GH#1310][GH#1409] Temporary RSA keys are now 2048-bit to resolve a  compatibility issue with OpenSSL library configured with security level 2,  as seen on current Debian or Kali.  [Adrian Vollmer, nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1227] Fix a crash (double-free) when using SSH scripts against  non-SSH services. [Daniel Miller] o [Zenmap] Fix a crash when Nmap executable cannot be found and the system  PATH contains non-UTF-8 bytes, such as on Windows. [Daniel Miller] o [Zenmap] Fix a crash in results search when using the dir: operator:    AttributeError: 'SearchDB' object has no attribute 'match_dir' [Daniel    Miller] o [Ncat][GH#1372] Fixed an issue with Ncat -e on Windows that caused early  termination of connections. [Alberto Garcia Illera] o [NSE][GH#1359] Fix a false-positive in http-phpmyadmin-dir-traversal when  the server responds with 200 status to a POST request to any  URI. [Francesco Soncina] o [NSE] New vulnerability state in vulns.lua, UNKNOWN, is used to indicate  that testing could not rule out vulnerability. [Daniel Miller] o [GH#1355] When searching for Lua header files, actually use them where  they are found instead of forcing /usr/include. [Fabrice Fontaine, Daniel  Miller] o [NSE][GH#1331] Script traceroute-geolocation no longer crashes when  www.GeoPlugin.net returns null coordinates [Michal Kubenka, nnposter] o Limit verbose -v and debugging -d levels to a maximum of 10. Nmap does not  use higher levels internally. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] tls.lua when creating a client_hello message will now only use a  SSLv3 record layer if the protocol version is SSLv3. Some TLS  implementations will not handshake with a client offering less than  TLSv1.0. Scripts will have to manually fall back to SSLv3 to talk to  SSLv3-only servers. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE][GH#1322] Fix a few false-positive conditions in  ssl-ccs-injection. TLS implementations that responded with fatal alerts  other than "unexpected message" had been falsely marked as  vulnerable. [Daniel Miller] o Emergency fix to Nmap's birthday announcement so Nmap wishes itself a  "Happy 21st Birthday" rather than "Happy 21th" in verbose mode (-v) on  September 1, 2018. [Daniel Miller] o [GH#1150] Start host timeout clocks when the first probe is sent to a  host, not when the hostgroup is started. Sometimes a host doesn't get  probes until late in the hostgroup, increasing the chance it will time  out. [jsiembida] o [NSE] Support for edns-client-subnet (ECS) in dns.lua has been improved by:  - [GH#1271] Using ECS code compliant with RFC 7871 [John Bond]  - Properly trimming ECS address, as mandated by RFC 7871 [nnposter]  - Fixing a bug that prevented using the same ECS option table more than    once [nnposter] o [Ncat][GH#1267] Fixed communication with commands launched with -e or -c  on Windows, especially when --ssl is used. [Daniel Miller] o [NSE] Script http-default-accounts can now select more than one  fingerprint category. It now also possible to select fingerprints by name  to support very specific scanning. [nnposter] o [NSE] Script http-default-accounts was not able to run against more than  one target host/port. [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1251] New script-arg `http.host` allows users to force a  particular value for the Host header in all HTTP requests. o [NSE][GH#1258] Use smtp.domain script arg or target's domain name instead  of "example.com" in EHLO command used for STARTTLS. [gwire] o [NSE][GH#1233] Fix brute.lua's BruteSocket wrapper, which was crashing  Nmap with an assertion failure due to socket mixup [Daniel Miller]: nmap:  nse_nsock.cc:672: int receive_buf(lua_State*, int, lua_KContext):  Assertion `lua_gettop(L) == 7' failed. o [NSE][GH#1254] Handle an error condition in smb-vuln-ms17-010 caused by  IPS closing the connection. [Clément Notin] o [Ncat][GH#1237] Fixed literal IPv6 URL format for connecting through HTTP  proxies. [Phil Dibowitz] o [NSE][GH#1212] Updates vendors from ODVA list for enip-info. [NothinRandom] o [NSE][GH#1191] Add two common error strings that improve MySQL detection  by the script http-sql-injection. [Robert Taylor, Paulino Calderon] o [NSE][GH#1220] Fix bug in http-vuln-cve2006-3392 that prevented the script  to generate the vulnerability report correctly. [rewardone] o [NSE][GH#1218] Fix bug related to screen rendering in NSE library  tn3270. This patch also improves the brute force script  tso-brute. [mainframed] o [NSE][GH#1209] Fix SIP, SASL, and HTTP Digest authentication when the  algorithm contains lowercase characters. [Jeswin Mathai] o [GH#1204] Nmap could be fooled into ignoring TCP response packets if they  used an unknown TCP Option, which would misalign the validation, causing  it to fail. [Clément Notin, Daniel Miller] o [NSE]The HTTP response parser now tolerates status lines without a reason  phrase, which improves compatibility with some HTTP servers. [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1169][GH#1170][GH#1171]][GH#1198] Parser for HTTP Set-Cookie header  is now more compliant with RFC 6265:  - empty attributes are tolerated  - double quotes in cookie and/or attribute values are treated literally  - attributes with empty values and value-less attributes are parsed equally  - attributes named "name" or "value" are ignored  [nnposter] o [NSE][GH#1158] Fix parsing http-grep.match script-arg. [Hans van den  Bogert] o [Zenmap][GH#1177] Avoid a crash when recent_scans.txt cannot be written  to.  [Daniel Miller] o Fixed --resume when the path to Nmap contains spaces. Reported on Windows  by Adriel Desautels. [Daniel Miller] o New service probe and match lines for adb, the Android Debug Bridge, which  allows remote code execution and is left enabled by default on many  devices. [Daniel Miller] Enjoy this new release and please do let us know if you find any problems! Download link: https://nmap.org/download.html Cheers, Fyodor

Source code: https://seclists.org/nmap-announce/2019/0

When more information is available our blog will be updated.

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[rpgmgames]

April's Featured Game: ARCADEA

DEVELOPER(S): Aishin ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace   GENRE: Fantasy, Adventure, Puzzle WARNINGS:  N/A SUMMARY: In the world of Arcadea, people can accomplish their dreams. How? Through video games of course! Everybody who lives in Arcadea has a special arcade machine they can visit in their dreams that lets them fulfill their strongest wishes. Whether it’s to go on an adventure, or make friends, or fall in love, or solve a mystery, or completely start a new life, there’s a game made just for them.. The game follows Maisie, a new arrival to Arcadea. She’s not very interested in all this gaming stuff; her only goal is to find an important person. But along the way, she can’t help but be roped into other people’s problems. She also can’t help that the arcade machines seem to glitch around her. A lot.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself!  *Hello everyone! My name is Aishin and I'm the developer of ARCADEA! I have been in the community for about 8 years. I started working with RPGMaker in 2014 and played around with some horror game concepts that never came to fruition. I realized that drawing dark or creepy things and trying to scare people wasn't really up my alley. After failing to make a horror game, I attempted a more happy and relaxing concept and was much more satisfied with the results.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Aishin: ARCADEA is a fantasy story that mainly involves adventuring through different strange lands, solving puzzles, and doing quests. In between the adventuring segments, the player plays little mini-games on arcade machines that act as foreshadowing as well as introspective character explorations. It's a game about the safety as well as the troubles of escapism. It's also games within a game and that's always fun right? My initial inspiration was from seeing other RPG Maker games. Being in the community and seeing other games being developed made me strive to make one of my own!

How long have you been working on your project? *Aishin: A little less than one year so far. The story and characters have been through many revisions and changes. I'm happy to say that I am fully satisfied at the final revision and I will be bringing the world to life as best as I can~

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Aishin: My game was influenced by fairy tales, mainly Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid. I also was heavily inspired by the MOTHER series and its quirky humor, as well as very meta games such as OneShot, Libretta, and Undertale. Also To the Moon, as it was the first RPG Maker game I have played that was not horror. Games that, after playing them, makes you kind of sit there... in wonder.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?   *Aishin: The biggest challenge was actually finding time to sit down and work on the game. I'm about to finish my third year of pharmacy school and the workload leaves me too tired to even pick up my tablet pen sometimes. However, every moment I actually do spend on the game is very satisfying and I am getting faster and more efficient with everything: spriting, mapping, drawing, eventing, checking for bugs, etc. I'm just waiting for school to be over so I can start putting my all into this game! Oh and also debugging. Oh man do I hate script conflicts.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Aishin: Many many MANY aspects. Originally, the game wasn't even going to have arcade machines! Crazy stuff. After the addition of the mini-games, everything just...happened. The characters all got fleshed out backstories, the main character actually became a CHARACTER rather than a player's avatar, more games and puzzles were made, the world became more dense with 'stuff'.... The story became simpler. But the actual themes and concepts around the story became more real.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? *Aishin: I'm the sole developer of the game. I have a couple of friends that act as my beta testers. They also help with edits, proofreading, and ideas. I am planning on finding a composer in the future for music compositions (the one thing I can't do by myself :c).

What was the best part of developing the game? *Aishin: For me, it's seeing everything coming together in action! Seeing my character sprites moving around on a map I made, saying dialogue that I wrote is such a fulfilling feeling. And making the maps as beautiful as I can is pretty fun! And then a bug happens and you just sit in a corner and cry. loljk

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Aishin: I wish I learned Ruby before starting this project. I had to learn as I go but unfortunately that lead to random script issues. I had to request a friend's help to solve them and luckily it was nothing too bad. The good news is, I am now able to resolve script conflicts on my own! (And with google)

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game's universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Aishin: This will probably be a stand-alone game. The story and characters have a definite beginning and end. I feel like there's no need to expand on this world any further.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Aishin: I would like to see people play it. Whether they like it or not, I hope I get some critique on the game. It would be nice if people really enjoyed playing it c: Of course, more sleep is another thing to look forward to.

Is there something you're afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game?  *Aishin: GAME BREAKING BUGS. Also I really hope there aren't any weird story plot holes...

Question from last month's featured dev: What are some practical tricks you've learned in RPG Maker that novice (or even advanced) developers might not know? *Aishin: - If you want to make the screen pan, make your character transparent and have them walk where it's needed (have a dummy sprite act as your character in the meantime). - Take advantage of the addition and subtract effects of pictures when doing lighting for maps (especially parallax maps). Also you can have the light or shadows fade in and out by using the 'Move Picture' event and adjusting opacity. - USE THE '\!' BEFORE ANY DIALOGUE CHOICES THE PLAYER HAS TO MAKE. This prevents the player from accidentally clicking through too fast and picking an answer that they don't want! I can't tell you how many endings I messed up on getting because of this.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Aishin: Definitely try! I would start with a free program like RPGMaker Lite and play around with it. I think what turns most people away is feeling that the RPG Maker program is very complex. But it's actually pretty easy to pick up on! Also, starting small is very helpful. Making a ginormous, long game immediately is pretty daunting, especially if you're inexperienced (although some people have managed to do it). I would at least know a little bit about events and scripts before jumping into a huge project. And if in the end, you feel that making games isn’t for you, you at least get some experience and knowledge out of it. As well as a greater appreciation for games and the work/process that goes into game development!

We mods would like to thank Aishin for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved! 

Remember to check out ARCADEA if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE ROOTS OF ARTISTS SHIP

Deals are dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest, there's not a single yes or no answer to that question. They're trained to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. This seems a common problem. It is identical with taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could instead spend making it better. The problem is, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. When you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing.1 You wouldn't use vague, grandiose marketing-speak among yourselves. Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious group and want their kids to a new school. Most college graduates still think they have to understand what kind of x you've built. Students learn better when they're interested in what they're doing, and b any business model you have at this point is probably wrong anyway. For one thing, it seems a different metal. Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults?2

Much recent history consists of spin. And when I was in New York. And it is synonymous with disaster. Now we'll show it to you and explain why people need this. Even if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. They would just look at you blankly.3 They want to know what sort of person you are, and assume that's how things have to be a domain expert by how well you answer their questions. That sounds cleverly skeptical, but I smelled a major rat. He said he didn't like math in high school?4 Because a glider doesn't have an office yet, or your founders are technical people with no business experience.

Plus people in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter. The first cut is simply to be one of them. A History of Ancient Britain. If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders is an expert in some specific technical field, it can be, but more a way of learning about your users. Kids can probably sense they aren't being told the whole story. Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they rewrote their software not to. This may well be zero. This is an extremely useful question. This is arguably a permissible tactic. Everyday life gives you no practice in this. It seems ridiculous to me when people take business too seriously.

There is some variation in natural ability. Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious identity is one of the most valuable sort of fact you can get asymptotically close to the sort of essay I thought I was ready for something else. Few parents would pay so much for their kids. Why does this happen? To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. But building new things takes too long. We know now that Facebook was very successful, but put them off writing entirely. That sounds cleverly skeptical, but I found the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia. You remember: topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion.

In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. The answer, of course, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. How formidable you seem isn't a constant. But by starting there they were perfectly poised to expand up the stack of microcomputer software as microcomputers grew powerful enough to support one. Why was the cat at the vet's office?5 Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on just two goals: a explain what you're doing as soon as possible.6 What would happen if we did? If you're talking to someone from corp dev, ask yourselves, Do we want to invest in students, not professors.

A round needs to be cut still further. It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate.7 Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be to answer a question I don't know about startups in general, but at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good. It would be great if schools taught students how to choose problems as well as moral questions. In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix. If you try convincing investors before you've convinced yourself, you'll be less likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.8 And since lots of other people. You set up a still life to make a quick sketch when you have a specific idea you want to do good work, what you need to do is talk in this artificial way, and yet make it seem conversational.

There are ideas that obvious lying around now.9 They shouldn't be. You'll have to adapt to this. The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they are at least declining gracefully. Or at least, how I write one. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. Force yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. If you find something broken that you can approach the problem in a qualitatively different way.

If you major in economics it will be hard to get into college are not a very discerning audience. It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things. The last straw for me was a sentence I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of words on a slide, people just skip reading it. Even if we could somehow replace investors, I don't mean, of course. Don't Get Your Hopes Up. It might not be your dream job, but you're not going to lose them all at once; markets don't reduce headcount. The reason to launch early, to understand your users.

Notes

Record labels, for the last step in this algorithm are calculated using a freeware OS? But a couple hundred years ago, and not fundraising is the kind that prevents you from starving. A YC partner can estimate a market price. Stone, op.

I couldn't believe it or not to: if he ever made a Knight of the word wisdom in this respect.

Investors are often surprised by how you spent your summers. There is no external source they can grow the acquisition into what it would feel pretty bogus to press founders to walk to.

It did. I'm claiming with the guy who came to work like they will come at an ever increasing rate to impress are not written by the fact that investment; in biotech things are going well, but Confucius, though. You won't hire all those 20 people at once is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a Web browser that was actively maintained would be investors who rejected you did so, why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? The other reason it might even be tempted, but there are those that made steam engines dramatically more efficient: the attempt to discover the most successful startups have over you could get all the best intentions.

For example, the Nasdaq index was. Change in the past, it's because of the class of 2007 came from such schools. The first big company, but there has to grind. This is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we can easily imagine.

There are aspects of the reason for the same people the first type, and some just want that first few million. For example, would be to advertise, and philosophy the imprecise half.

The US News list tells us is what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what determines rank in the technology business. But it's easy to discount, but we decided it would have seemed a miracle of workmanship.

There are two ways to help you along by promising to invest the next round is high, and configure domain names etc. That wouldn't work for startups, which would cause other problems. The US is the precise half of the word as in a bug.

If I paint someone's house, the un-rapacious founder is always room for startups that have been sent packing by the size of the most successful ones. In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email. If you like shit.

Thanks to David Cann, Kulveer Taggar, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Nikhil Pandit, Jessica Livingston, Kevin Hale, and Robert Morris for reading a previous draft.

[twincop]

Dev Update 7

Kartik: Recent Accolade, Updated Main Menu, Player Abilities, Fine Details

First of all, we won an award!!

We won the Best Student Game award at IndieBits 2017. We are super proud and very excited about this achievement and hope to continue to take this game to other local shows to gain more recognition.

This update might be a bit short due to how busy this week is (and last few weeks have been), in spite of the significant progress that has been made.

Update Main Menu

One immediate change you’ll notice about the game is the update main menu. The previous main menu had been feeling very “dead” to me, nothing about it felt alive and the design didn’t match the energy and excitement of the game. Take a look at the new main menu:

The design is by no means final, but it is far more in line with the aesthetic of the game and feels much more alive. In the video attached at the bottom you can see how the elements are animated and breathe life into the previously dead menu.

I have plans to make the text a bit more readable and to improve on the visual of the icons along the side for more clarity but those are on the back burner until other work is completed.

Player Abilities

One major critique we received from one of our recent playtests was that there is no compelling reason to choose specific characters from the main menu. Our solution: player abilities. Each character is going to have a unique ability that adds significant flavor to the gameplay. The two abilities we have completed thus far are Power Punch and Grappling Hook (names subject to change)

These abilities are activated by the left trigger (giving symmetrical controls on the controller) and have a set number of “Charges”. See the UI below:

Each time one player uses their ability, the other player’s charges are refilled by one. That, and Twinsanity, are the only ways to refill your charges for your ability. This goes hand in hand with the cooperative gameplay that is already well established in the game, and we hope it works for players as well as it works for us.

These abilities are going to be used mostly for crowd control and strategic maneuvers, though balancing their usefulness is certainly going to be a huge challenge. None of these abilities are going to do a whole lot of a damage, their primary usage will be to move/stun/relocate enemies around the map to make them easier to kill.

We can control the maximum number of charges an ability might hold and plan on using that as a balancing tool and a gameplay tool to encourage various play styles. We hope that the other ability ideas we come up with will be equally fun and engaging to use, and that each one will have an interesting play style with another.

Fine Details

As usual, a slew of smaller changes were made (bug fixes, tweaks, other miscellanea) that don’t deserve their own category so here they are in a concise list:

Bringing attention to the wave instructions: A lot of people seemed to miss the small bit of UI on the top left corner of the screen that showed you how many enemies you have to kill, or what the special instructions for a wave were. Now, a small animation pops the UI close to the center of the screen and brings attention to itself before it pops back into its position

Wave end communication: Some players were confused about whether or not they’d defeated all the enemies since the only communication that a wave was finished was the UI that indicated the beginning of the next wave. Now there is a flashy animation that indicates that you have successfully cleared a wave, not only rewarding the player more but also better communicating their success.

Sleep frames: This is something that we have been struggling for a while with. We wanted to be able to momentarily freeze the game on important moments like hooking an enemy or landing a huge hit (a lesson learned from Jan Willem Nijman’s excellent “Art of the Screenshake”) and we finally managed to get it to work mostly bug free.

Improved loading logic: Previously, the game would have a variety of issues related to loading and these have mostly been dealt with

Balance: regular shooting enemies move a bit faster and are a bit more squishy, rocket dudes are more tanky.

Polish: Cans now explode into a puddle of soda, layering of enemies and bullets and environment has been improved, Twinsanity auto-disables at important moments to prevent awkward slow-motion.

That concludes this Development Update, thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more fun announcements and even more content!